Context Matters

Music is the space between the notes. – Claude Debussy

Life is noisy. People, traffic, television, the radio, the Zoom call, my own stream of conscience blasting thoughts at me every minute of the day.  The garbage collector driving down the street, the dogs barking at the mail truck, the persistent buzz of the fan above my head.  Sitting here writing this today, I hear my daughter slurping milk, the wind blowing up the back hill, the laundry machine tumbling downstairs.  A cacophony of sound that ebbs and flows throughout the day, but never really silences.  

Hearing is such a gift. I was young when I learned that my ears worked differently than most. A teacher noticed me turning my head towards her when she spoke and recommended that I see the school Speech and Hearing Therapist.  The next morning, I found myself sitting in a tight, dark, blue paneled booth, wearing massive, heavy headphones and holding a small trigger button.  The instructions were simple enough, press the button when you hear a tone. 

The test began and I quickly sensed a series of tones increasing in pitch rising up through my left ear at regular intervals. So far so good. Then for a long period, many heartbeats, I heard nothing but silence. I closed my eyes, chastised myself for losing focus, strained my right ear, willing it to hear.  In desperation, I imagined ghost tones and I began pressing the button reflexively, in irregular rhythms.  I knew I had failed before they even removed my headphones.  Mrs. Barnes produced a letter for me to give to my parents.  “Melissa exhibited profound hearing impairment during her initial screening.”  

My particular impairment was the result of an early childhood illness. One day when I was very small, having just turned one, I developed a fever.  As my temperature rose, I became lifeless, and my back stiffened.  My family rushed to the hospital where I was diagnosed with meningococcal meningitis.  Mom and Dad were warned that if I survived, there were likely to be significant physical and mental difficulties. Despite the dire predictions, in time I recovered.  Antibiotics are miracle medicines, and I was given a lifetime supply during my three-week hospital stay. My only souvenirs from the experience would be nerve damage in my right ear and a mild antibiotic allergy.

One learns to adapt; life goes on. My hearing loss was embarrassing and frustrating.  I learned to sit close to the sound source, turn my head for whispers and read lips. I may ask you to repeat things or crank up the volume.  I insist that my kids talk one at a time and enunciate their words clearly.  The single most helpful strategy is to minimize the constant hum and rumble of competing sounds.  If I can reduce the background noise, my brain will focus on the sound that really matters. 

This focusing experience is like listening to a choir sing and then asking your ears to pick out a specific part from the whole.  If you decide that you want to hear the alto voice, and tune your ears to really listen, your ears will automatically reduce the volume of the sopranos, the tenors, the bass, and simultaneously increase the alto.  With just a few moments of concentration, your brain will hear, interpret and adjust the relative sound levels, allowing you to focus on the component most important to you in the moment.

Autostereograms are an example from another sensory experience: sight. Your eyes are adjusting focus to send two slightly different images to your brain, which interprets them to perceive depth. This technique allows the hidden 3D image to lift out of the image and separate from image noise around it.

Sometimes, the barrage of sound is so overwhelming that my brain can’t decipher the noise. It feels like a glitch in the system, a short circuit of my internal wiring.  In these moments, my mind either blanks out or starts sparking nonsensical, out of context words.  When this happens, I know, I need a deep breath, a pause.  It’s time to create a quiet space to reset.

In a professional setting, when managing complex, dynamic, unpredictable projects it’s easy to be overwhelmed by both the metaphorical and literal noise.  There are often multiple stakeholder voices clamoring for your attention, numerous simmering escalations on the verge of flaring out of control.  There is a constant thrum of conversation, texts, chats, and emails covering every possible element of the project scope.  The result is a massive tangle of project clatter that must be teased apart.    

There are only so many hours in a workday.  Even the brightest of use humans can only truly, effectively, manage a few topics at a time. We can only single out a finite number of notes within the chord before our brain becomes overwhelmed; and the full force of the sound knocks us flat. While every component of a project is intertwined, we must be able to sift them apart and compartmentalize into what matters right now versus what will matter in the future.  We must decide in the moment which plate to spin and at what force to keep the whole thing moving at once. 

The underlying ethos of the Contextual Gantt Planning System (CGPS) serves as guideposts to project managers, helping us to make sense of our projects, clearing out the noise and focusing our energy.  They help guide us through the jumble, inform how we frame our challenges, how we present our data, and how we enable decisions. This ethos of CGPS encourages us to be:  

• Simple
• Intuitive 
• Visual 
• Objective
• Service Minded 
• Action Oriented 

Over the next six essays, we’ll closely examine each element of the CGPS ethos.  We’ll define each one, look at examples, and see how they can practically be applied to improve our projects. At the end of the series, we’ll also consider how all elements of CGPS ethos, when applied together, have magnifying power, just like a microphone, to clarify, focus, amplify and drive projects forward.  

#ethos